Broadway Baptist Forms Task Force to Address Racism, Propose Reparations
In response to the death of George Floyd and the public protest it sparked around the nation, the historic Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth has formed a special task force to study and address matters of systemic injustice within the Church and society, and propose reparations for the Church’s participation in systemic racism.
The task force is called the “ACT Council”, with the word “ACT” being an acronym Senior Pastor Ryon Price included in a letter to the Board of Deacons in September. The letter, titled “A Time to ACT: Acknowledge, Confess, Transform” called upon the congregation to form a committee charged with helping its membership acknowledge “histories of both confrontation with and also complicity in the personal and societal sins of racism, segregation, white supremacy, and other forms of prejudice and/or exclusion, including discrimination relative to gender, [and] sexual orientation.”
Broadway Baptist, founded in the Near Southside of Fort Worth in 1882, is a historically white institution which voted to integrate its membership in 1963. It was one of the first Baptist churches to ordain female deacons and ministers and in 2009 the church was removed from membership in the Southern Baptist Convention over its welcome of openly-gay members.
“Like all churches our age, we have a checkered past of inclusion and exclusion, courage and compromise,” Price said. The purpose of the ACT Council is to recognize the history, understand how the history still shapes us in the present, and dedicate ourselves to a more just and inclusive future.
“It’s something every institution in America ought to be doing.”
The appointment of the 15-member Council comes as many institutions of higher learning and seminaries have begun to reckon with darker parts of their own histories – especially with respect to race. But Price said the recent release of books like Robert P. Jones’s White Too Long and Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise demonstrate the degree to which the church was and still is complicit in the enforcement of a racial caste system in America.
The Council is co-chaired by Broadway member and former Chair of the Broadway Board of Deacons Mattie Compton, an African American woman and retired Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of Texas. She is a former chair of the Black Lives Matter Initiative for the Western Area of the Links, Incorporated.
“The May 25, 2020 videotaped murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police brought irrefutable evidence to national attention of law enforcement abuses,” Compton said. “COVID-19 laid bare inequities experienced by people of color in delivery of health care, housing, access to the polls, food insecurity, and so much more.
“These events mandate immediate action by people of faith.”
Compton’s Council Co-Chair, Broadway member and retired Director of Extended Education at TCU, the Rev. David Grebel said Broadway is at “an inflection point” and “a pivotal moment in its history.”
“The Spirit of God is inviting us as a congregation to learn to express the gospel in a fuller way,” Grebel said. “That includes learning to confess corporate sin and live into repentance.”
In December’s quarterly business meeting, the congregation overwhelmingly voted to form the Council and charge it with accomplishing seven proposed outcomes. These include the creation of a permanent standing Justice Committee; a diversity audit of all policy, practices and curricula; the expansion of membership to explicitly include and affirm people of color, women, LGBTQ persons, and persons from other Christian denominations at all levels of congregational participation, including leadership; and research into Broadway’s history relative to Jim Crow segregation, and the recommendation of reparations for the sake of past harm and future healing.
Compton said she hopes the impact of the Council’s work will have a broad reach, beyond the walls of Broadway.
“We will be exploring and admitting our own role in racism, inequities, and disparities; providing a curriculum that accurately teaches the history of the United States, and developing means of making reparations for Broadway’s own systemic racism.
“Despite a lifetime marked by segregation and exclusion, I remain hopeful that Broadway’s ACT Council will positively impact our church body, Fort Worth, and the broader world community,” Compton said.
